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When Hans Wekking wants to sell someone on the advantages of a home-based solar power system, he talks about the gasoline he’s no longer buying since installing his.

The Wekkings bought a Nissan Leaf electric car about the same time he put solar panels on the roof of the garage of their Surrey home. He factors the $200 a month he used to spend on gas in with the electricity he generates to determine his system’s payback.

“Say (the solar system) is $10,000 installed, and you have an electric car — the money you save on gas pays for the system in four years,” Wekking says.

Wekking, an electrician who also installs solar systems, is among those who see a bigger future for solar, which is becoming a huge presence in places such as Europe and China.

For now, solar electricity has a negligible presence on the BC Hydro grid. Hydro has no utility-scale solar power generation in service, and just one 1.05-megawatt solar demonstration project being built in Kimberley. In addition, a handful of businesses and homeowners, like Wekking, are going on their own to install solar power both to save money and for green, conservation-minded motives.

Among those are the Auto West BMW dealership in Richmond, the Gabriola Island non-profit GabEnergy, which is willing to buy solar panels in its efforts to promote sustainable energy, and a growing number of individuals who have been emboldened by plummeting prices of the technology.

BC Hydro has 360 residential and small commercial customers generating solar power using the utility’s net-metering program, according to spokeswoman Simi Heer. Combined, the systems add up to 1.9 megawatts worth of generating capacity, compared with BC Hydro’s system of 12,000 megawatts.

Net metering, which BC Hydro adopted in 2004, allows customers to tie their solar-power systems into the local electric grid so that when the panels produce more power than the household is using, that electricity can be poured back into Hydro’s system to be consumed in the surrounding neighbourhood. BC Hydro meters that electricity and credits customers for producing it.

Wekking said his three-kilowatt solar system has generated about 3,450 kilowatts worth of electricity in just over a year of operation, which is about one-third of his family’s demand. Take the electric car out and he said it would be closer to half, or even three-quarters.

That in itself is small scale, but sustainable-energy advocate Guy Dauncey believes that increasing levels of environmental consciousness and falling prices for solar panels will unleash a huge wave of do-it-yourself installations, which could reduce demand for what BC Hydro is generating.

Four-kilowatt household systems that cost $30,000 to install five years ago now cost about $16,000, Dauncey said. If trends hold, he said that the price could be reduced to $6,000 by 2020.

“Bit by bit, people are using less power from BC Hydro,” said Dauncey, co-founder and communications director for the B.C. Sustainable Energy Association.

“So when this thing takes off, in what I call a solar tsunami,” BC Hydro will notice, he added, and it will put B.C. in the same league as places such as California or Germany, where officials are promoting solar energy as sustainable power.

And he believes BC Hydro is underestimating the potential impact on its revenue.

However, BC Hydro isn’t anticipating significant growth in the technology because of its cost, and utility officials believe they have a good handle on what is coming their way in terms of demand, according to Alevtina Akbulatova, manager of Hydro’s net-metering program.

“In 2004, when this program was designed, the idea was that we will allow customers to connect to the grid with the intent of displacing their (demand),” she said.

In technical terms, household solar power is referred to as distributed generation, which is typically consumed close to its source. So if a residential power system generates more electricity than the home uses, it is typically consumed within the neighbourhood and doesn’t make it onto Hydro’s larger grid, she added.

However, customers have to apply to BC Hydro for permission to make a connection and Akbulatova said Hydro staff do conduct a “limited technical review” to determine whether a particular solar system could be disruptive to the grid, in which case it would be rejected, she said.

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